Well, I fell on my ass a bit there, didn’t I? And off the wagon with a little bit of overgrooming and I did wind up buying a pack of smokes after a week. I’m still proud of myself. I handled so much pain in the past three days, all across the board, without completely shutting down or getting too sucked into it.
I’m still on my Billy Joel kick. Speaking from my heart. To my heart.
Days like these, tons of memories come back. Shame. Misery. Loathing. Anger. Frustration. They are like acid on the wounds that never close. I wind up chanting- “Let it go. It doesn’t matter, let it go. You can’t change it. Let it go.” Most of the time, it works. I’ve got lots of little meditations or chants like this to help me deal.
Being open to people is hard. They will hurt you. Will. That’s part of loving them and accepting them. So, here’s the deal. For me, it’s the intent I see as to whether or not I get crushed inside and how intense that crushing is. On top of how often it happens.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” I fully believe this.
What’s going on in the back of my head at the moment is a memory I have of my shy mother standing up for me. Outside of our family, she was ferocious in a graceful way. What she saw on a daily basis- people not thinking about their actions and the damage it can cause… well, unfortunately, she brought that home and internalized a lot. It wound up crippling a lot of what she allowed herself to do or be capable of, within our family environment. It taught her fear and she lived it. Every day. On top of the horrific experiences with her husband, my father. She had too much of a conscience, to the point where she stopped being. Where she stopped me from being.
This particular memory, though… it is a precious one.
I was young. Perhaps eight. Perhaps twelve. I can’t honestly remember. I had received a set of watercolors for my birthday, the brushes to go with them, and some pre-printed mat boards. The ones where the pictures are already drawn in lines.
Water colors are not supposed to normally have sharp edges. The drying of pigment saturation is supposed to give shading and shapes. Brush control and amount of pigment…
I was in the sunroom of my grandmother’s house. Playing with my birthday presents. Making pictures. Mom, my sister, and I went to a lot of museums in those days. My mother’s joy with art. The joy. I can still see the joy on her face looking at impressionists. The joy on her face when we were out in the woods and I would wind up covered in mud or my sister in grass stains. All of it was exploring our world, in it’s beauty, inside, outside.
My grandmother, on the other hand, was an artist. Of sorts. Not one that you would see in galleries or anything like that. The typical high society lady, of the era from her own childhood, where women painted, drew, played the piano, etc. She was my teacher, in a way. It should have been a share. Should have been.
Mom came home from work, right in the middle of my grandmother berating me for going outside the lines on the mat board with the water and the colors I had chosen were all wrong. I had hunched in on myself. The joy that my mother was trying to teach me, share with me, died so many times under the perfection my grandmother tried to mold me into. That day was no different.
Before someone thinks of this as some rich chick bitching about how hard life is, let me say that while my grandmother had money, we did not. My mother walked away, for the most part, from that life and I have always been grateful that she did. There were several days she went without proper meals so my sister and I could eat, and several needs of her own that she did without for us. We were taught, in my mother’s home, to cherish life. To live simply. To enjoy the complex and the simple. To be self-sufficient and to see all the wonders around us. Like her own childhood had been, with her own father. My grandparents, though they loved each other, were polar opposites. Grandma had her own maid as a child. Grump, on the other hand, lived on a farm and slept in the same bed with more than half of his brothers. He worked hard for his family and wow, what he became is a way cool, interesting story (and not into the family business of psychology). Grump very nearly gave Grandma back the lifestyle she’d grown up with by the time he retired.
That day, with the watercolors, was the day most of my remaining innocence was ripped away. With everything I had been up to by that point, the abuse, violence, molestation, that day was too much to bear.
My mother said one sentence to my grandmother. That it was my choice what I did and she had no problem with me going outside the lines. There was anger in her thin, erect form. For me. On my behalf. They went elsewhere to speak as I continued to sit with my paints.
I overheard their argument. It was then I learned that all the opportunities and classes my mother presented to me, to have fun and some sort of a normal childhood: art, piano, violin, gymnastics, dance, tap, ballet, swimming… all of it. Most of it was paid for by my passionate grandmother in order to fix what she saw was wrong with me. Physically, from the birth defects, and mentally, with the little they knew that had been done to me by my father. The gifts weren’t gifts.
While I know my grandmother loved me, it was her driving need to have the perfect family that produced those experiences. Not love. Of all her children, my mother was the least type A. Grandmother’s denial of who other people were was at the heart of most of her interactions. Whatever didn’t fit her mental image of ideal.
The real gift my mother had been trying to give me was harshly dented. I learned that people are usually quite selfish in what they do for others. But that day, I also learned two other things. One, that my mother was, sometimes, willing to bend her own pacifistic moral compass for me when it wasn’t life or death and two, what it cost to remain with the family in order to at least attempt to give my sister and I what we needed.
I love her even more for it, despite the damage caused by buying into family bullshit.
My anger with Mom, for the most part, has been that she stopped seeking that joy. She was so tired. Inside. And she refused to get herself the help that she needed or to do the harder things to learn to live free again. This is how I learned to step on myself. The overbearing, harshly critical, opposing ways of my family.
I mention all of this because I don’t normally care for surprises. This is why. What was shown to me at so young an age was that they are rarely gifts meant for me, but are built up in someone else’s need. Many, many things were done to me that I had little control over, little say in the matter, little way to object. Rape, beatings, food, gifts. It is all one and the same in my head. It is the intent I look for.
The past week? Someone I care greatly for who is incredibly well meaning, telling me that one pain I have is not personal. Guess what? Most of what was done to men wasn’t personal. It had nothing to DO with me, even though I was the object of the circumstance.
My grandmother’s gifts had nothing to do with me. They were her way of obtaining that blond haired, perfect child. And the violence from my father had nothing to do with me, either. I was simply the means to destroy my mother.
That is what I have been facing down the past couple of days. It isn’t a question of speaking it out loud. “Getting it out.” When your wounds are constantly reopened by the people you love, that care about you, you can not heal, so speaking it doesn’t help.
What does help is when that person who has caused you damage listens. I was very angry with someone, held on to the anger instead of turning it in on myself again, worked it, worked through it by simply feeling it, then spoke.
She listened and I do not think that two parts of the problem will ever come back. She makes an effort to see, even if she will remain what I feel is self-serving and overly stifling. Because she knows what I gave up for her. Because I know she does love me, without understanding me very well. She is one of the few that at least tries, and that is a gift worth accepting and remaining open to receive.
She is also one of the two people in my life that have managed to surprise me in a good way. A Christmas gift that I had not picked out for myself or put on a list, one that was simple, not overwhelming, not in martyred self-sacrifice or hardship, one given without guile, one I would have picked for myself, from someone who has done the same kind of damage my Grandmother did. The gift, the real gift.
That is what I held on to, with the other damage this person did. A cherished memory from three years ago. A moment of clear connection without drama. Only joy and happiness.
So while I have fallen on my ass, and off the wagon, I am back up again. Dealt with the memory of violent harshness- physical and emotional- within my head without causing harm. And I am back to feeling the world can be better than it was yesterday.